Our once-mild climate is increasingly extreme โ and how we talk about it is now another front in the culture wars
In this fragmented but supposedly mild country, watching and talking about the weather forecast is meant to be a reassuring, unifying activity. Collectively, we have created and maintained a national climate narrative of small disappointments and pleasures. The first weather forecaster to appear on British TV, George Cowling, made his debut on the BBC in January 1954, predicting that โtomorrow would be rather windyโ, but โa good day to hang out the washingโ. For most of the 72 years since, such brief, carefully calibrated broadcasts have provided people from Aberdeen to Penzance with practical information, small talk and minor grumbles about essentially the same situation: living in a country where the weather is constantly changing, in a paradoxically unchanging way.
Yet like the traditional British climate, that common weather culture may now be evaporating. โMet Office considers issuing red โextreme heat warningโ across Britain while nation enjoys โincredible summerโ,โ said the headline above the forecast on the GB News website on Monday, caught between terror and delight at the latest heatwave. As the climate crisis has affected this country in more and more unmistakable but uneven ways, TV weather forecasters have increasingly struggled to find the right language to describe this transformationโs daily consequences. Their struggle influences and exemplifies that of many Britons to understand, and work out what we think about, the apparent end of the weather patterns we expected to shape our whole lives.
Andy Beckett is a Guardian columnist
